


To The Bone

by blanketed_in_stars



Series: 52 Weeks of Wolfstar [25]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1993, 1994, Forbidden Forest, Hogwarts, M/M, Obsession, Padfoot - Freeform, Post-Sirius in Azkaban, Sirius Black Free from Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 03:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4205907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketed_in_stars/pseuds/blanketed_in_stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius's first year of freedom feels a lot like captivity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To The Bone

**Author's Note:**

> Week 25 (I finally caught up!)

The scent of rats. Wet fur. Leaves and twigs rustling around his ears. These are things that Padfoot has always loved, and that Sirius has grudgingly accepted.

At the end of Magnolia Crescent, Harry is a smudge, only standing out because of his white shirt. He stands frozen, wand out—Padfoot wants to go closer, to smell, but Sirius knows that hiding is how this game is played. He waits, and Harry trips.

In the glow of the Knight Bus, Padfoot slinks away, back to the forgotten corner of the park where he can escape the harsh streetlamps. He shakes back into Sirius with ragged muddy robes and hair that resembles something a cat coughed up. Just one glimpse of his godson has him aching for more, because he knows it's not James, but the way he _stood_ —even that was just like his father did.

It’s summer, so there are no leaves to scrape together and soften the ground, not that it would make much of a difference. Sirius lies down beneath the tall chestnut trees. First on his side, then on his back. Stretching his body out to its full length is a luxury that he still hasn’t grown used to. He settles into the grass, staring up at the light-polluted sky.

Night is difficult. It always seemed to be night in Azkaban. Sirius much prefers sunny days, especially sunrises. At night he has to sleep, he knows it, but twelve years of Dementors have contorted his dreams into mangled, deformed versions of all his memories. So here he is, bone-tired, haunted by Harry, awake.

The first time Sirius sees the Wanted posters, he forgets to be a dog. He rears up onto his hind legs and places his front paws on the wall, so his head is just level with the picture. The face that stares at him is terrifying. Even Padfoot can sense that something about that gaze, two-dimensional though it is, is wrong, and he whines. Sirius surrenders and drops back onto all fours.

It becomes easier to ignore the posters after a while. He can pretend that they aren’t him, aren’t even anyone he knows. Most of the time it feels like he doesn’t know anyone, so the game isn’t hard to play, and he walks on by without twitching an ear.

It’s Padfoot more often than not. Sirius bears an unsettling resemblance to the man with a reward on his head and can’t risk anything, not now, when he’s so close. Halfway through October he finally sees the castle looming over the forest in front of him like an awful judgement. It used to be his home, and then his home was the cottage, and by now Sirius doesn’t remember what it’s like to have a place like that. He lets Padfoot do all the remembering. That way his biggest concerns are squirrels.

There’s a cat, though, and that scruffy ginger fleabag is what keeps Sirius from forgetting it all—the intelligence in those eyes, well, he spends a night thinking not of old hallways but of the sort of clever things he could get up to. Asking for forgiveness gives way to a single word, chanted into meaninglessness, _Peter, Peter, Peter._

He steals a knife from Hagrid, helped along by the old boarhound whose name Sirius can’t quite recall. He doesn’t mean to use it—it’s insurance, he tells himself, he’s waiting—but then the leaves fall and Padfoot can’t even whimper himself to sleep. He keeps seeing a house without a second story, fire on carpet, a cracked pair of glasses.

So he goes in through the passage they found in their first year, behind the mirror, and ducks around corridors until he realizes that it’s Halloween. Then he runs.

The Fat Lady knows him, calls him a good-for-nothing bastard, the same fond way that Lily did. Sirius asks her if he can go in. She says no. He presses, insists, it is a matter of life and death, and she must open. She refuses.

He can’t hold it back, he’s slashing, cutting, driving the knife deep into canvas and wood, but it’s not enough. Sharp metal won’t undo the magic this castle is steeped in. He flees, and sobs deep in the forest, and when it’s too much to bear he grows a tail and two extra legs and hopes that it will work. It doesn’t. He spends the night rolling in something foul, which can’t cover the scent of salt that he thinks will always cling to his fur.

November brings a distraction, although he’s not quite sure how he manages it. Padfoot sits very un-doglike in the Quidditch stands and watches. It’s a dreamy, disconnected feeling, seeing Harry fly. Sirius knows him immediately, even at that distance, even through the rain and bad vision—of course he does, he moves like he was born on a broom, the way James did.

There is a different sort of disconnected feeling when the Dementors arrive, closer to the sensation of being cut loose and plummeting. Harry drops out of the sky while Sirius heads for the trees. There is flying, and then there is falling, and in between there is Peter.

He almost—almost—almost succeeds in the spring. The cat, beautiful, mangy, and cunning, brings him a list of passwords. Sirius thanks him and makes his way into the castle again, this time in the dark. The painting of an idiot knight calls him an overachiever and swings aside obligingly.

The common room is as familiar as anything in this place. It is also very messy. Sirius creeps around Honeydukes wrappers and empty butterbeer bottles to the staircase, and up to the third year dormitory where he eases the door open.

The picture from the _Prophet_ is faded and wrinkled with months of wilderness, but Sirius knows whose bed he’s looking for. He cuts the hangings and stares—and the boy stares back, and opens his mouth and screams.

Once again, Sirius runs for it, slamming the door behind him. Down the stairs, through the portrait hole, behind the mirror. Padfoot tears across the grounds and into the forest where he howls, and howls, and realizes eventually that he has fingers again and that his face is wet.

 _What will it take?_ he wonders, crazed, hands crusted with dirt as black as his name, as his thoughts. He is so close but for all the luck he’s had, he might as well be back in his cell.

Sirius regains a measure of composure and rushes into Padfoot. The simplicity of that mind makes him exhausted, suddenly—a dog doesn’t know what to do with betrayal and regret. He curls up deep between the trees and snuffles into the cold, thawing earth. This is what he’s familiar with, now: leaves and twigs rustling around his ears. Wet fur. Always, the scent of rats.


End file.
